The Spider-Orchid (2 page)

“
D
ARLING, WE’RE TOGETHER
at last!” cried Rita, shaking the rain from her hair and spilling a suitcase, a bulging plastic carrier bag, and a clanking tangle of metal coat-hangers into the circle of lamplight at his feet. “
Together!
In our very own home!”

My
very own home, Adrian found himself thinking
uncontrollably,
even while he folded her in his arms, murmuring into her ear all the appropriate words of welcome.
My
flat.
Mine.
And now the woman I love is moving into it, bag and baggage, and there is nothing in the wide world I can do to stop it, because it was my idea.

“If only we could be together
always!
” he’d said to her, not once but dozens of times over the past four years. Had said it, and had meant it.

But of course, he’d never thought for one moment that it would ever actually happen.

Aloud he said:

“Yes, darling, marvellous! I can still hardly believe it’s really happening….”

This, at least, was the truth. As with any major shock, his mind was refusing to take in, all at one go, the full enormity of the situation; it was letting the realisation get to him a little bit at a time, inch by inch, as much as his shrinking spirit could bear.

The plastic bag of groceries? He could face that. She often brought food when she came for the evening. The suitcase? That, too, was not totally unfamiliar; they had been away together occasionally. But the coat-hangers…? His eye slid past them as if they were a nasty street-accident piled up on the side of the road. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, just yet, take in their terrible
implications
—the dreadful glittering threat they posed to the very core of his comfortable, self-sufficient existence. His imagination simply blocked out, it refused, as yet, to envisage his well-pressed suits, his jackets, trousers and ties relegated to the darkest recesses of the wardrobe; squeezed back and back, in helpless retreat before
the victorious tide of dresses, blouses, fur jackets, matching handbags, platform sandals, knee-length boots … the lot.

And that would only be the beginning. Already he could see her eyes darting round the room, altering things, getting rid of things, planning where
her
things were to go.

“Marvellous, darling,” he repeated, as if he had learned the words by rote and was checking that he’d got them right. “
Marvellous!
I think this calls for a little celebration, don’t you?”

Diving into the drinks cupboard by the fireplace, he tried to compose his face a little before facing her again.

“Well, cheers, darling!” he heard himself saying a minute later. “To us!” And as they touched glasses, his neat whisky against her gin and tonic, he found himself staring not into Rita’s sloedark, expectant eyes, but into the shining yellow liquid in his glass. How long, he was desperately wondering, could the drink be made to last? Because once the drinking was over, then the thing would really have to start.

Drinking to future happiness is one thing; embarking on it quite another.

“Darling, I’m so happy!” cried Rita, as she had every right to do: and, “Darling, so am I!” he responded, with an awful sinking of the stomach. Over the glittering rim of the whisky, he fixed his eyes on the black, springy hair through which his fingers had so often ruffled; on the white, untroubled brow which had once seemed to betoken such serenity of spirit; and he tried to feel the old, melting enchantment. But all he could feel was a sort of sick paralysis of the will; a sense of having lost control over his own life; the helpless terror of one who has sold his soul to …

*

What an unfair and terrible thought! Anyone less like the devil than Rita, with her pale, oval face, her big, pathetic eyes and tremulous mouth, it would be difficult to imagine. “Angel” would have been a fairer comparison—especially now, with that halo of raindrops round her hair … and only now did he realise, with compunction, that he had not yet invited her to take her coat off. She was sitting there, sipping gin and tonic, in wet shower-proof nylon.

“Darling, your coat … I’m so sorry!” he exclaimed, leaning over the back of the settee and slipping it from her shoulders. “It’s soaking, I’ll just …”

He stopped, brought up short as if by a sudden blow. The coat
belonged
here now. No good just throwing it over the rack in the bathroom to dry off in time for her to go home. She wasn’t going home. The coat was going to live here. There would have to be a place for it, a peg in the hall allotted to it.
Its
peg.

For several seconds Adrian just stood there, like a man in shock, the limp, damp, rust-coloured thing hanging over his arm like a dead animal, trophy of a hunt now disbanded.

“I’ll just … hang it up,” he muttered; and when he came back into the living-room he poured himself another whisky, holding it up against the light, screwing his eyes up as if to enjoy the golden radiance of it.

How the
hell
did I get into this, he was asking himself. How the hell
did
I?

*

But of course, he knew the answer. Knew, too, that it was no use blaming Rita. Even this morning—even in those first awful moments of hearing her babbling the glorious news down the telephone before he’d even had his breakfast—even then, he’d recognised that the blame was not hers. Those awful feelings that rose in his gorge as he listened to her ecstatic chatter were his, and his alone. Not her fault at all.

“Darling, you’ll
never
guess!” she’d cried excitedly; but of course he’d guessed at once, guessed without any shadow of doubt, taken aback only by the violence of his own dismay. He had no
right
to be dismayed, absolutely no right at all, he should have been over the moon with joy, because what she was doing was only what he had asked her to do—begged her, indeed—over and over again during the long, happy years when it was impossible. They’d agreed long ago—agreed jointly, and without acrimony or
argument
—that if only Derek would agree to a divorce, then she’d come and live with Adrian.

And now, this very day, Derek
had
agreed. In the first shock of hearing the news, Adrian had felt, for a moment, as if he had been betrayed by his dearest friend.

Which was ridiculous. He and Derek Langley had only met a couple of time in all these years, both times, naturally, in the role of enemies. In the circumstances, there was no other role open to them.

Which was a pity, in a way, for Adrian had felt no hostility at
all to Derek as a person. In fact, he had rather liked him; the sensation he remembered most clearly from that first encounter had been one of vague, foolish gratitude towards the man for being nearly a decade older than himself, with grey, thinning hair and gold-rimmed bifocals. It had seemed to simplify things; and though, in fact, the assumption was to prove illusory, Adrian still retained in his recollections the pleasant sense of easy superiority it had engendered in him at the time. The ensuing conversation had, in the nature of things, been somewhat prickly and
uncomfortable;
but Adrian had nevertheless formed a mildly favourable impression of his rival. Derek Langley seemed a quiet, inoffensive sort of man, sensible and well-balanced, and with an intriguingly expert knowledge of wild flowers in Britain. Few subjects could be more remote from Adrian’s own special interests, but all the same, Adrian liked expertise in no matter what sort of field; liked and admired it, and recognised it when he saw it.

In happier circumstances—or perhaps one should say less
dramatic
ones—he and Derek could have been friends; but of course in their respective roles of importunate lover and outraged husband, this would never have done.

The second time they’d met had been some months later, on a grey January afternoon just after Adrian’s own divorce had been successfully completed.

“But she loves me! You
can’t
stand in the way of her happiness like this!” Adrian remembered declaiming; and, “Can’t I? Just you watch,” Derek had countered placidly, and had gone on
sticking
labels on to his colour slides, licking and placing each one in position with careful accuracy.

“But that’s just possessiveness!” Adrian recalled himself
protesting
—he remembered that the winter afternoon light was already fading in Derek’s quiet, book-lined study. And Derek had nodded his head thoughtfully, agreeing that Yes, it probably was just possessiveness: he was rather a possessive sort of person, actually.

*

It had seemed like deadlock. Adrian had raged, Rita had sobbed, and Derek had gone on preparing his talk for the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Botanical Society; and it presently emerged—though when or how such a decision had been reached Adrian could never clearly recall—that Poor Derek mustn’t be upset; he would come round in his own time, but meantime Rita
mustn’t do anything nasty to him, like leaving him for another man, or neglecting to be home in time to cook his supper.

Naturally, Adrian had at the time fought this rather
unadventurous
programme with all the fervour that becomes an impassioned lover: but actually, in the end, it had all worked out rather well, with Rita arriving at two o’clock on Thursday afternoons to go to bed with him, and taking herself away promptly at four because of Poor Derek. Sometimes, she came on Tuesday evenings as well and cooked a meal for Adrian; or maybe they’d go to the theatre together, but she was always gone well before midnight because of Poor Derek, and so Adrian was able to get to bed at his usual time. He hated being kept up late; it triggered off in him a tiresome kind of insomnia that kept him half-awake, half-dreaming for the best part of the night, leaving him depressed and irritable, and quite unfit for the pressures and demands of his job the next day. Poor Derek, it seemed, suffered a similar problem, that’s why Rita had to be home so promptly by midnight. They made a singularly compatible triangle, Adrian sometimes reflected; they could hardly have been luckier in one another.

How comfortable it had all been, he mused now, staring
disconsolately
into the golden depths of the whisky. How secure, and settled, and unbothersome! Even the yearnings and the
frustrations,
he realised now, had been an integral part of the happiness.

“Oh, if only you didn’t have to
go
, darling,” he’d so often sighed, as the hands of the bedside clock crept onward, and Rita began to fidget, and look for her stockings, and think about trains to Wimbledon; “Oh, if only you could stay with me longer … all night….”

Actually, it would have been most inconvenient if she’d stayed all night: not because anyone else in the house would have objected—least of all the landlady—but simply because staying all night necessarily involved still being there in the morning, and this Adrian would have found it hard to tolerate. At forty-seven, a divorced man, and already four years away from the turmoil of family life, Adrian had developed a number of small habits which he himself recognised as old-maidish, but nevertheless had no intention of relinquishing—and foremost among these was his rigid early-morning routine. Up at seven—long, leisurely bath, followed by yoghurt, cornflakes, egg boiled for an exact four minutes—and all the time a book propped in front of him—on the
soapdish, alongside the bathroom mirror, or leaning against the coffee-pot while he ate. And there was the silence, too, the sense of unassailable solitude. Lovely, enveloping solitude, from which he could emerge unscathed into his busy day like a moth from its cocoon.

*

All of which was completely incompatible with Rita. Why he was so sure of this, Adrian would have found it hard to say, since he had never given her a trial; but he just knew.

And now, through no fault of his own—unless letting things slide, taking each day as it came, were to be counted as faults—now, the whole thing was to be whipped from under his feet, without warning or apology. Whipped away not just for a single
morning
—and even
that
prospect had, in the past, been enough to put him on his guard—but for
all
his mornings, for the rest of the foreseeable future.

Rita not wanting to be woken as early as seven … Rita in the bathroom … Rita saying why not shredded wheat? … Rita boiling his egg too soft, or, as the case might be, too hard….

That Rita would take over these and similar housewifely concerns, despite any protests that Adrian might nerve himself to make, was a virtual certainty. She (like any other woman in her position) would know that she had just so long to make herself indispensable to him, and so she would set about it without delay, burrowing like a frantic woodworm into the structural framework of his life in order, with a touch here and a touch there, to make sure that the previously smooth-running machinery would no longer work without her. The organising of his breakfast would undoubtedly be one of her first projects; she would appropriate it to herself with all speed, and, simple though Adrian’s routine might sound, and carefully as he might explain it to her, she would inevitably get it subtly wrong.

His
fault this, of course, for being so pernickety; but nevertheless, she would.

The reading, of course, would be the first thing to go: the delicious habit of reading non-stop while he ate, while he bathed, while he shaved. During the four years he had been on his own, he had solved one by one all the minor practical problems attendant upon such a habit, even the problem of his reading glasses
steaming
up in the bath. Now, just when there was no little annoyances left at all,
this
had to happen!

*

Of course, no woman could be expected to put up with this sort of thing, morning after morning; or, if she could, then the unremitting consciousness of her sitting there putting up with it would have been every bit as disturbing as outright nagging.